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in Fulham Court. The period from our arrival to my departure for Woolverstone is muddled and confused and my mind plays tricks with chronology. I remember the
sort
of things we did; particular highlights stand out, as do ‘trends’ such as our constant presence at Fulham Baths. Swimming was something all of us did well. I think all of us won prizes in the inter-borough championships at Lime Grove baths in Shepherds Bush. I know I did, and somewhere there is a newspaper cutting of my eldest brother with his prize. But swimming was cheap and kept us off the streets – although not necessarily out of trouble.
    Fulham Baths were staggeringly beautiful. It was a classical Victorian bathhouse with three swimming pools (Ladies, Men’s and Mixed), all with a gallery around them for spectators, old iron pillars, exquisitely tiled walls and mosaic floors. There were also real baths where people could go and get clean, and a huge laundry. All that is left today is the façade, behind which a rump of the entrance hall still stands and in which a dance studio and gym have been created. The grotesque vandalism that allowed this masterpiece of municipal design to be knocked down and replaced with identikit housing just
had
to be the result of a back-hander. We always suspected corruption at every level of our lives, and we certainly knew of many incidents involving the local constabulary. However, when I was a child, Fulham baths was my church, my playground and just about my every thing. Paying a few pence for hours of fun, we would walk the huge corridor that seemed to go on forever and ever to the changing rooms, where baskets were collected, filled with our belongings and then handed back to the attendant to place on a numbered shelf. Emerging through the shallow foot cleaning pools into the main baths was like entering another world. The cacophony of noise that greeted you was thunderous, and in the mixed pool, the biggest of the three, hundreds of people, mainly kids, were busy jumping in and splashing around. Not much actual swimming went on here. My brothers, my friends and I all became familiar with the surroundings and of course, began to take advantage. We let off the big hosepipes and did all of the things the signs around the pool forbade us to do; “No running, no diving, no petting.”
    Occasionally, the pool attendants became the target of our japery, and I do recall one day when the head man of the pool was thrown in by a gang of us, only to get out and reveal he had a couple of hundred quid tucked into his short pockets. He showed us the sopping wet bank notes to prove it andbarred us all for a week as punishment. They used to throw us in, too, the attendants, disobeying their own rules, and such an incident resulted in a trip to hospital for me and another pool user. Four of them had grabbed me and pitched me backwards into the pool, but as I flew into the water, a swimmer emerged beneath me and my heel connected with his tooth, which tore an inch-long gash into my foot before going through his lip.
    Fulham Baths was where we all came together. It kept us out of Mum’s hair for a while, and although our own hair and eyes were burned by the hours in chlorinated water, it was probably healthy too. But it could only occupy us for some of the time and, naturally, dangers lurked around every corner. Woolverstone was thus a genuine glimpse of hope for Mum.
    At this point, you might be wondering what Woolverstone actually was. Simply put, it was an experiment, and it sought to prove that if you took under-privileged boys, often from broken homes, and gave them a public school style education, you would see some remarkable results. In the fifties, the Inner London Education Authority bought a large country estate in Woolverstone, near Ipswich, employed a batch of extremely talented teachers and established a school of three hundred and sixty boys, although that number wouldn’t be reached for several years. Children from